On Ubuntu, applications published in the store run under confinement. In practice, it means that applications only have write and read access to a set of specific directories and need to declare security policy groups to be granted access to most device functionalities and content. This allows a speedy review process and is a security measure to protect user data and system integrity.

Introduction to Security Policy groups

To access most features of the operating system, your app needs to request the relevant security policy groups. This article focuses on setting this up for your app.

Security Policy groups are channels between your app and the rest of the system

Whether your app needs to record audio, access the network or do anything outside its confined context, you need to know which security policy group it needs to declare to be granted access. Doing so opens controlled channels between your app and the rest of the system.

Practical example

Let’s imagine a comics creator app, which would allow the user to snap a few pictures, place text on it, merge them in a single image and share it with other people. Here are the groups you would need to use :

Take one or several pictures with the camera: camera

Make it available to other applications: content_exchange_source

Share it with other people: networking

If you forget to declare a group, it will prevent your app to work normally, as we will see in a moment.

Meet Permy

To have an overview of what is generally allowed to do with an Ubuntu app, you can search for Permy in the store and install it on your device. It shows security policy groups used by installed applications. For example, here is what Permy can tell us about Reminders (an Evernote sync app).

Reminders is granted access to playing audio, accessing the network, displaying pages in a webview, accessing other apps content via the content-hub and accessing the online accounts framework. With these policy groups declared, it can retrieve the user’s Evernote credentials and handle the various types of content that can be stored in notes.

Declaring policy groups with the SDK

In the “Publish” view of the SDK, you can declare policy groups your app needs. You can manage them and see the full list of available groups with their description. Doing this directly edits your click packaging files.

The first lines on the right pane of the groups list gives you a short description of what the policy group will grant you access to. Each policy group will allow you access to certain file paths and system calls. The full list can be viewed below the description.

Invalid and reserved policy groups

If you happen to manually edit policy groups in your click packaging files, some may be invalid. In that case, your package won’t be validated by the SDK and show a warning. Note that the store always rejects invalid packages. A handful of policy groups, such as calendar or debug, are reserved to certain types of apps, as you can see in red in their descriptions. If you declare one, your app will be rejected by the store and will have to be fixed to comply.

Debugging and logs

Application confinement is ensured by AppArmor, a framework designed to restrict applications to a limited set of resources. Each time your app is trying to use a device functionality or reading and writing data, the action is authorized or denied by AppArmor.

What happens when my application tries to use a functionality I’ve not declared or I’m not allowed to?

It depends on what it is trying to do : it may crash, it may misbehave, it might just not use the functionality or even appear to work fine. It essentially comes down to what you are trying to use and how the app is written to handle these denials. In any case, if AppArmor denied it, there will be a message in a log file.

Where are logs?

Authorization denials are stored with other system messages in /var/log/syslog. You can filter them with:

grep DENIED /var/log/syslog

To ensure proper logging of all AppArmor messages when developing your application, you might need to disable logging rate limiting: